Surgical sponges are commonly used during surgical procedures to absorb body fluids, mostly blood, of the patient both inside the incision and around the site of surgery. Sponges of this nature are usually made of an open ended absorbent fabric such as woven cotton. When used, surgical sponges become saturated with blood, alter in size and shape and therefore become hard to distinguish from body tissue and each other. For this reason, surgical sponges can be hard to identify and account for both during and after a surgical procedure. Surgical sponges can be inadvertently left inside the patient at the end of surgery. This problem can become magnified in larger surgical procedures where there are a large number of sponges used.
Surgical items may have to be counted before and after surgical procedure. Surgical sponges can be a difficult item to account for before, during and especially after a surgical procedure.
Typically medical personnel count these items by hand, based on human visual detection in the body and visual detection and counting to differentiate one sponge from another and account for the sponges when outside the body. If a sponge count taken during or after a procedure does not match the sponge count taken before the procedure, an x-ray can be taken of the surgical site to detect whether or not the missing sponge is still in the patient.
Thus, this method is prone to human error and is therefore unreliable and inefficient. The large amount of time involved in differentiating the sponges from one another and accounting for them leads to large costs. Additionally, the unreliable nature of the method can lead to miscounted sponges resulting in surgical sponges being inadvertently retained inside the patient. Such issues may adversely affect not only the health of the patient, but may also prove costly to the hospital and insurance companies involved.